Stuff

We have good four or five polls in the final Sunday papers before the election, here is what’s appeared so far:

Opinium in the Observer continue to show a very tight race, in this case with the Conservatives just ahead. Topline figures are CON 35%, LAB 34%, LDEM 8%, UKIP 13%, GRN 5%. Full tables are results are here. Note that while the Observer describe the poll as the last Opinium/Observer poll before the election that doesn’t mean it’s Opinium’s final call, they’ll hopefully have another poll in the week.

ComRes have a new telephone poll for the Independent on Sunday and Sunday Mirror. Their topline voting intention figures also have the race right down to the wire – CON 33%, LAB 33%, LDEM 8%, UKIP 13%, GRN 7%. Interestingly this is a telephone poll rather than an online one, in the past ComRes have tended to do online polling for their Sunday newspaper contract and phone polling for their daily newspaper contract. It suggests we may not be getting an online ComRes poll we can compare to the election result. Tabs are here.

Survation for the Mail on Sunday have Labour ahead. Their topline figures are CON 31%, LAB 34%, LDEM 8%, UKIP 17%, GRN 4%. Their poll also included a version of the question prompted with candidate names in respondents’ own constituencies (something MORI used to do in their face-to-face polls at election time and Angus Reid did in their election polls in 2010) – that produced figures of CON 29%, LAB 33%, LDEM 9%, UKIP 16%, GRN 6%. Tabs are here.

The YouGov poll for the Sunday Times continues to float around neck-and-neck. Today’s figures are CON 34%, LAB 33%, LDEM 8%, UKIP 13%, GRN 5%. YouGov and the Sunday Times also have a new (separate!) Scottish poll, that has topline figures of CON 17%, LAB 25%, LDEM 5%, SNP 49%.

A three point Labour lead from YouGov, a four point Conservative lead from Opinium. They are each a nice corrective for anyone liable to get too excited about the other one, we are probably just seeing normal variation about that same old underlying position of Labour and Conservative being pretty much neck and neck.

Full update to come tomorrow (in the meantime, the Election Guide part of the site is now updated to take account of the full nomination lists in all GB constituencies with the exception of Sutton & Cheam and Carshalton & Wallington, where nominations still aren’t on the council website).

Two polls tonight – Opinium in the Observer have topline figures of CON 34%, LAB 33%, LDEM 8%, UKIP 13%, GRN 7% (tabs). All par for the course, and fieldwork was on the 24th and 25th March, so prior to the Paxman interviews on Thursday.

More intriguing is YouGov’s weekly poll for the Sunday Times. Fieldwork for this was done on Friday and Saturday, so was wholly after the Paxman interviews. Topline figures there are CON 32%, LAB 36%, LDEM 8%, UKIP 13%, GRN 6%. A four point Labour lead. I’ll write more tomorrow, but I’ll leave you with the usual caveats, it’s just one poll, it could be boost for Labour from the interviews or it could just be normal random variation, only time (and subsequent polling) will tell…